Is America a Free Nation? No. It is a vicious
Presidential dictatorship with revolving heads of state and
legislators ninety-seven-percent of whom are re-elected term-by-term
in a control information environment in which these enslaved people
are convinced they are free when they are merely subjects of ongoing
propaganda, war, threats of imprisonment, and lies.

In 2007, the publication of previously secret
Central Intelligence Agency documents revealed that Stokely
Carmichael who renamed himself Kwame Ture had been tracked by the
CIA as part of their surveillance of black activists abroad, which
began in 1968 and continued for years.

INVENTED THE PHRASE "BLACK POWER" IN 1967
ALSO INVENTED THE TERM "INSTITUTIONAL RACISM"
FLED THE UNITED STATES TO AVOID PROSECUTION & HARASSMENT

Early life and education

Born in
Port of
Spain,
Trinidad, Stokely Carmichael moved to
Harlem,
New
York City in 1952 at age eleven to rejoin his parents,[2]
who had left him with his grandmother and two aunts to
emigrate when he was two. He attended the elite[3]Tranquility
School in Trinidad until his parents were able to send for
him.[4]

His mother, Mabel R. Carmichael,[3]
was a stewardess for a steamship line, and his father
Adolphus was a carpenter who also worked as a taxi driver.[2]
The reunited Carmichael family eventually left Harlem to
live in Morris Park in the
East Bronx,
at that time an aging Jewish and Italian neighborhood.
According to a 1967 interview he gave to
LIFE Magazine, he was the only black member of the
Morris Park Dukes, a youth gang involved in alcohol and
petty theft.[2]

He attended the
Bronx High School of Science, a specialized public high
school for gifted students with a rigorous entrance exam,
from which he graduated in 1960.[5]
His experience with the intellectual riches of the high
school convinced him to drop his friends from the Dukes
gang.[2]

He joined the Nonviolent Action Group (NAG), the Howard
campus affiliate of SNCC.[1]
He was inspired by the sit-ins to become more active in the
Civil Rights Movement. In his first year at the university,
he participated in the
Freedom
Rides of the
Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and was frequently
arrested, spending time in jail. In 1961, he served 49 days
at the infamous
Parchman Farm in
Sunflower County, Mississippi.[2][9]
He was arrested many times for his activism. He lost count
of his many arrests, sometimes giving the estimate of at
least 29 or 32, and telling the
Washington Post in 1998 he believed the total number was
fewer than 36.[3]

SNCC

In 1965, working as a SNCC activist in
Lowndes County, Alabama, Carmichael helped to increase
the number of registered black voters from 70 to 2,600 — 300
more than the number of registered white voters.[2]
Black residents and voters organized and widely supported
the Lowndes County Freedom Organization, a party that had
the
black panther as its mascot, over the white dominated
local
Democratic Party, whose mascot was a white rooster.
Although black residents and voters outnumber whites in
Lowndes, they lost the county wide election of 1965.[citation
needed]

It is a
call for black people in this country to unite, to
recognize their heritage, to build a sense of
community. It is a call for black people to define
their own goals, to lead their own organizations.

”

While Black Power was not a new concept, Carmichael's
speech brought it into the spotlight and it became a
rallying cry for young
African Americans across the country. According to
Carmichael: "Black Power meant black people coming together
to form a political force and either electing
representatives or forcing their representatives to speak
their needs [rather than relying on established parties]".[10]
Heavily influenced by the work of
Frantz
Fanon and his landmark book
Wretched of the Earth, along with others such as
Malcolm X,
under Carmichael's leadership SNCC gradually became more
radical and focused on Black Power as its core goal and
ideology. This became most evident during the controversial
Atlanta Project in 1966. SNCC, under the local
leadership of
Bill Ware,
engaged in a voter drive to promote the candidacy of
Julian
Bond for the
Georgia State Legislature in an
Atlanta
district. However, unlike previous SNCC activities — like
the 1961
Freedom
Rides or the 1964
Mississippi Freedom Summer — Ware excluded Northern
white SNCC members from the drive. Initially, Carmichael
opposed this move and voted it down, but he eventually
changed his mind.[11]
When, at the urging of the Atlanta Project, the issue of
whites in SNCC came up for a vote, Carmichael ultimately
sided with those calling for the expulsion of whites,
reportedly to encourage whites to begin organizing poor
white southern communities while SNCC would continue to
focus on promoting African American self reliance through
Black Power.[12]

Carmichael saw
nonviolence as a tactic as opposed to a principle, which
separated him from moderate civil rights leaders like
Martin Luther King, Jr.. Carmichael became critical of
civil rights leaders who simply called for the
integration of African Americans into existing
institutions of the
middle
class mainstream.

“

Now,
several people have been upset because we’ve said
that integration was irrelevant when initiated by
blacks, and that in fact it was a subterfuge, an
insidious subterfuge, for the maintenance of white
supremacy. Now we maintain that in the past six
years or so, this country has been feeding us a
"thalidomide drug of integration," and that some
Negroes have been walking down a dream street
talking about sitting next to white people; and that
that does not begin to solve the problem; that when
we went to Mississippi we did not go to sit next to
Ross Barnett; we did not go to sit next to
Jim Clark; we went to get them out of our way;
and that people ought to understand that; that we
were never fighting for the right to integrate, we
were fighting against white supremacy. Now, then, in
order to understand white supremacy we must dismiss
the fallacious notion that white people can give
anybody their freedom. No man can give anybody his
freedom. A man is born free. You may enslave a man
after he is born free, and that is in fact what this
country does. It enslaves black people after they’re
born, so that the only acts that white people can do
is to stop denying black people their freedom; that
is, they must stop denying freedom. They never give
it to anyone.[13]

”

According to Bearing the Cross (1986),
David J. Garrow's
Pulitzer Prize winning book about the
Civil Rights movement, a few days after Carmichael used
the "Black Power" slogan at the "Meredith March Against
Fear," he reportedly told King, "Martin, I deliberately
decided to raise this issue on the march in order to give it
a national forum and force you to take a stand for Black
Power." King responded, "I have been used before. One more
time won't hurt."

In 1967, Carmichael stepped down as chairman of SNCC and
was replaced by
H. Rap
Brown. The SNCC, which was a collective and, in keeping
with the spirit of the times, worked by group consensus
rather than hierarchically, was displeased with Carmichael's
celebrity status. SNCC leaders had begun to refer to him as
"Stokely Starmichael" and criticize his habit of making
policy announcements independently, before achieving
internal agreement, and gave him a formal letter of
expulsion in 1967.[3]
There is some speculation around Carmichael’s reasoning for
stepping down from the chairman position of SNCC. According
to his personal narratives, Carmichael witnessed African
American demonstrators being beaten and shocked with cattle
prods by the police. Witnessing the helplessness of people
so fully committed to the non-violent approach gave
Carmichael a new perspective, one which condoned the use of
violent techniques against the brutality of the racist
police force. Carmichael’s new tactics sought to reciprocate
the fear instilled in African Americans by the police force,
[14] which led to the creation of the militant
social group known as “The Black Panthers.”

After his time with the SNCC, Carmichael attempted to
clarify his politics by writing the book Black Power
(1967) with Charles V. Hamilton and became a strong critic
of the
Vietnam War. During this period he traveled and lectured
extensively throughout the world; visiting
Guinea,
North
Vietnam,
China, and
Cuba. After his expulsion from the SNCC, Carmichael
became more clearly identified with the
Black Panther Party as its "Honorary Prime Minister."[3]
During this period he became more of a speaker than an
organizer, traveling throughout the country and
internationally advocating for his vision of Black Power.[15]

The death
of Che Guevara places a responsibility on all
revolutionaries of the World to redouble their
decision to fight on to the final defeat of
Imperialism. That is why in essence Che Guevara
is not dead, his ideas are with us.[16]

”

Vietnam

Carmichael joined
Martin Luther King Jr. in New York on April 15, 1967 to
share his views with protesters on race in terms of the war
in Vietnam.

“

The draft
exemplifies as much as racism the totalitarianism
which prevails in this nation in the disguise of
consensus democracy. The President has conducted war
in Vietnam without the consent of Congress or the
American people, without the consent of anybody
except maybe Lady Bird.

Self-imposed exile

However, Carmichael soon began to distance himself from
the Panthers. The Panthers and Carmichael disagreed on
whether white activists should be allowed to help the
Panthers. The Panthers believed that white activists could
help the movement, while Carmichael thought as
Malcolm X,
saying that the white activists needed to organize their own
communities first. In 1969, he and his then-wife, the
South African singer
Miriam
Makeba, moved to
Guinea-Conakry where he became an aide to Guinean
prime minister
Ahmed Sékou Touré and the student of exiled
Ghanaian President
Kwame
Nkrumah.[5]
Makeba was appointed Guinea's official delegate to the
United
Nations.[18]
Three months after his arrival in Africa, in July 1969, he
published a formal rejection of the Black Panthers,
condemning the Panthers for not being
separatist enough and their "dogmatic party line
favoring alliances with white radicals".[2]

It was at this stage in his life that Carmichael changed
his name to Kwame Ture to honor the African leaders
Nkrumah and Touré who had become his patrons. At the end of
his life, friends still referred to him interchangeably by
both names, "and he doesn't seem to mind."[3]

Carmichael remained in Guinea after separation from the
Black Panther Party. He continued to travel, write, and
speak out in support of international leftist movements and
in 1971 collected his work in a second book Stokely
Speaks: Black Power Back to Pan-Africanism. This book
expounds an explicitly
socialist,
Pan-African vision, which he seemingly retained for the
rest of his life. From the late 1970s until the day he died,
he answered his phone by announcing "Ready for the
revolution!"[2]

While in Guinea, he was arrested one more time. Two years
after Touré's death in 1984, the
military regime which took his place arrested Carmichael
and jailed him for three days on suspicion of attempting to
overthrow the government. Despite common knowledge that
President Touré engaged in torture of his political
opponents, Carmichael had never criticized his namesake.[2]

Carmichael and Makeba separated in 1973. After they
divorced, he entered a second marriage with Marlyatou Barry,
a Guinean doctor whom he also divorced. By 1998, his second
wife and their son, Bokar, born in 1982, were living in
Arlington County, Virginia. Relying on a statement from
the
All-African Peoples Revolutionary Party, his 1998
obituary in
The New York Times referenced two sons, three
sisters, and his mother as survivors but without further
details.[2]

Death
and legacy

After two years of treatment at the Columbia-Presbyterian
Medical Center in New York, he died of
prostate cancer at the age of 57 in
Conakry,
Guinea. He
claimed that his cancer "was given to me by forces of
American imperialism and others who conspired with them."[2]
He claimed that the
FBI had introduced the cancer to his body as an attempt
at
assassination.[19]
After his diagnosis in 1996,
benefit concerts were held in Denver; New York; Atlanta;[4]
and Washington, D.C.,[3]
to help defray his medical expenses; and the government of
Trinidad and Tobago, where he was born, awarded him a
grant of $1,000 a month for the same purpose.[4]

In 2007, the publication of previously secret
Central Intelligence Agency documents revealed that
Carmichael had been tracked by the CIA as part of their
surveillance of black activists abroad, which began in 1968
and continued for years.[20]

In a final interview given to the
Washington Post, he spoke with contempt for the
economic and electoral progress made during the past thirty
years. He acknowledged that blacks had won election to major
mayorships, but stated that the power of mayoralty had been
diminished and that such progress was essentially
meaningless.[21]

Stokely Carmichael is credited with coining the phrase "institutional
racism", which is defined as a form of racism that
occurs through institutions such as public bodies and
corporations, including universities. In the late 1960s
Carmichael defined "institutional racism" as "the collective
failure of an organization to provide an appropriate and
professional service to people because of their color,
culture or ethnic origin".[22]

Civil rights leader
Jesse
Jackson gave a speech celebrating Carmichael's life,
stating: "He was one of our generation who was determined to
give his life to transforming America and
Africa. He
was committed to ending racial apartheid in our country. He
helped to bring those walls down".[23]

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